As we’ve been told since 9/11, the government needs certain special powers in
order to keep us safe from terrorism. The PATRIOT Act, FISA Courts, telecom
immunity, the
NSA looking at your naked pictures – all of this is made or enhanced
in the name of fighting the type of monsters who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
Certainly the Fourth Amendment can be weakened in the name of that most noble
of goals.

And man, has it! But as
I have previously mentioned in this space, the convenient thing for
the security state fanatics is that so much of the anti-terrorism work has been
done for them already in the name of another cause all together. Frequently,
that would be the war on drugs.

Earlier this month, the Administrative Office of the US Courts released
their report on 2013 state and federal wiretaps. A great deal of ventures
were excluded from the report, most prominently ones which go through the FISA
Court. So, this isn’t a terrorism report. But at the same time, it confirms
the fact that government powers – assuming they were well used, effective,
reasonable, moral, etc., etc. until the end of time – are not for worst case
scenarios. They are not for would-be murderers or terrorists. They are for the
current panic of the moment. And the panic that has had legs for decades is
the one over narcotics. Eighty-seven percent of the 3,115 wiretaps that took
place last year were over drugs. Homicide came in at number three at "less
than 4 percent of applications."

This is not new. And it’s not isolated to law enforcement unrelated to terrorism.
PATRIOT made so-called "sneak
and peek" warrants easier. What does the government use the power
to paw through your belongings without informing you for? Narcotics
investigations, again. Between 2006 and 2009, that was the catalyst
for 1600 uses (to be fair, there were 15 terror investigations in that time,
which probably saved trillions of lives).

Since the war on drugs was officially declared by Nixon, then militarized
by Reagan, there have been shockingly literal versions of its name put into
practice both here and
abroad. There are truly too many examples to mention. The black helicopter,
U-2 spy planes, dystopian nightmare that was California’s ‘80s
CAMP raids, put together to take out Humboldt County’s massive weed growing
enterprises, defy description. (And defy any attempt to argue that the war was
not really a war.) And the
normalization of daily US police raids which violate the sanctity of the
home mostly over reports of a substance should be fought against. Yet, it’s
hard not to become cynical after news of yet another SWAT action, yet another
reckless police discharge of a firearm, and yet another dead dog.

The Fourth Amendment was on life support even before the PATRIOT Act and mass
NSA spying. And that’s where the national security hawks get truly cynical,
and conveniently right about everything. If the war on drugs – which can be
blamed on both parties, perhaps a little more on Republicans – was worth the
violation of myriad rights, how could stopping terrorism not be worth even more
freedom-for-security? This is for stopping another 9/11! Sure, we’ll grant you
that maybe we went crazy over stopping pot, but this is peoples’ LIVES!

The NSA swear it’s essential for American safety, but they are
wiretapping entire countries, including the terrorism-free Bahamas. They
write on their documents that the war on drugs "has all the risks, excitement,
and dangers of conventional warfare, and the stakes are equally high."
If everything is the same as war, why complain about war? Everything short of
a boots on the ground invasion of a country has already been done in the name
of the war on drugs. So what’s a little metadata, anyway?

And what rights the war on drugs starts to unscrew, the war on terror loosens
even more, and then once you have that sneak and peek power thanks to PATRIOT,
well, might as well use it in drug investigations since they are more common
than terrorism ones. The state always wins this way. It’s brilliant.

There are politicians who might be willing to dial down the war on drugs, Sen.
Rand Paul being one such example with his sentencing reform efforts. There are
politicians like Sen. Mark Udall and Rep. Justin Amash who have admirably gone
after the NSA. All of this is good, but none of it is enough. Mission creep is
the nature of the state. The war on terror has caused hundreds of thousands
of deaths. It has given us a spying dragnet that extends God only knows
how far. But back when most people assumed that plane hijackers intended to
live through the experience, the war on drugs was killing, kidnapping, and destroying
individual rights, and almost nobody gave a damn.

It’s not about the dangers of one agency, department, or endless abstraction
of a cause so much as it’s about the fact that there is so much fine print on
our rights. The rights of Palestinians, Iraqis, drug users, immigrants, gun
owners, suspicious lefties, and crazy right-wingers, and other lesser people
are subject to the "your life doesn’t matter as much" clause the state
may put into effect at any time. The war on terror has confirmed what the war
on drugs already showed us – we need to refuse to fight the next abstract,
endless campaign against some elusive bad. (Next up might be piracy and cyber
attacks!) Because there is almost no chance that that bad could ever
be as damaging as the war against it is sure to be.

Leaders are bunk. Their own power is what these people are fighting for, nothing else. It doesn’t matter if they believe their cause is good,
or if they are movie villains chewing scenery and scheming about their jackboots.
The end result is still the same, and the casualties are all around us.

Lucy Steigerwald is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and a columnist
for VICE.com. She previously worked as an Associate
Editor for Reason magazine. She is most angry about police, prisons, and wars.
Steigerwald blogs at www.thestagblog.com.

201231769211 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Flucy%2F2014%2F07%2F17%2Fits-not-about-fighting-terror-its-about-having-power%2FIt%27s+Not+About+Fighting+Terror%2C+It%27s+About+Having+Power2014-07-18+06%3A00%3A02Lucy+Steigerwaldhttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012317692 to “It’s Not About Fighting Terror, It’s About Having Power”

"Everything short of a boots on the ground invasion of a country has already been done in the name of the war on drugs."

Nice factual article Lucy, but you might want to brush-up on the history surrounding the US military invasion of Panama in 1989.. Which came about for the purpose of removing president Manual Noriega who for years had served in the as the CIA's chief drug lord in the region, but who apparently became a little greedy and decided to stop splitting his profits with his long-time pall, George H.W. Bush

but before people [priests, 'nobles', and modern 'nobility'; ie, master classes] attain power, they have to accept the ideology that they are [by god's or nature's design] abler, more deserving, have more rights, etc. than the others; usually ma and pa kind of people.
in short, they have to be believers in supremacism–both the personal and national.
all scribes, 'liberals' i know of assiduously eschew this fact; thus, plow and plow and never ever sow; ergo also reap; ie, enlighten people.

Lucy Steigerwald is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and a columnist for VICE.com. She previously worked as an Associate Editor for Reason magazine. She is most angry about police, prisons, and wars. Steigerwald blogs at www.thestagblog.com.